19th October 2010 - New release - Many booking management tweaks

It has been a busy few weeks for us however this list of changes isn't that long this time. Most of our changes have been in making existing functionality better, easier to configure or harder to get confused by.

Tours / option setup* Fixed % deposit value possible now for tours/options. The previous "excluded from deposit" and "included in deposit" have now been transferred to this setting - either at 0% or 100%. Obviously now you can do values inbetween. Previously it was only possible to do % deposits based on the entire booking price - but now you can do what you like.* Layout changes - settings have been moved around the place. Please shout if you don't know where a setting has gone. We haven't removed any, trust us!

Bookings & Customers* Customer records on bookings - now try to be even more clever on how customers are ordered within a booking. We *think* we have sorted out how to order by age within family groupings taking into account that we tend to know the exact ages of children (from their date of birth) but don't know the ages of the adults.* Bug fix - now handle email addresses with single character domain names. Turns out these were recently introduced so we missed that. Only ever had this problem once, but now its fixed forever!* Automate emails for expired quotes, expired provisional, pre-trip email, post-trip email. For post trip emails you can, on an individual booking, turn that off (in case something happened on the trip that wasn't so good news, so you don't want to email the customer asking if everything was fine - if you are already talking to them about why it wasn't)* Travel agent commission tokens - making it easier to inform your agents (automatically) regarding commission owning to them (or balance minus commission if you are working that way around)* Multiple phone types can be added to customer summary (custom reports)* Order by booking name order (customer summary, booking summary - custom reports)* Now able to, via the XML API, say no marketing permission for new customer records. Handy if you are using the XML API to connect with a contact us form on your website - now you can handle email subscription more correctly.* Able to email multiple bookings at once. Go to advanced booking search - from bottom of that you can email all the customers (or agents) associated with those bookings. If you get to the advanced search results from an individual tour departure you can also send an email to everyone on the same trip.

Booking engine* Now can take bookings in Norwegian. Since Norwegian went live its actually been taking bookings at a pretty good rate so must be working :)

Lastly, we have put live http://toursift.com/ - which is a demonstration website for the TourCMS Marketplace. Do take a look.

Thanks for putting those changes live, that is a huge help. Pre and Post Trip emails are particularly useful for us and if anyone else is wondering where to switch them on it is in website manager>booking emails.

The other tweaks are of course also great and will really help to improve our CRM.